Well testing day is done. As someone that is fairly new to the day to day of the project it looked pretty successful to me.

[Itamar Heim]

On 06/21/2012 08:04 AM, Robert Middleswarth wrote:
> I saw in IRC several people who didn't have redhat addresses testing the
> projects. From what I have read this was an improvement over the 3.0
> testing day.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for taking the time to both test and reflect on it.
your feedback is most welcome.

some notes below.

...
>
> 1) Need to set a process for adding people onto the team. Someone else
> besides me has offered to help with the infra but there doesn't seem to
> be a process to add people to the group. It seems to be really to much
> work for the few people I see running things part time and it shows.

Karsten - can you please weigh in on getting the infra group bigger. not 
every infra member need to own/help with all hosts, since each has its 
own expertise, but more people could help maintaining them.
maybe a weekly infra call to orchestrate efforts around this?

>
> 2) Linnode and EC2 are great to get things running quickly but they can
> also be pretty costly especially EC2. We need to start looking into ways
> to save money at the same time giving the project more flexibility in
> testing and building. There are several options for this but I always
> believe in the old saying that someone should always "eat your own dog
> food". So an oVirt or a RHEV cluster should really be on the table. If
> there isn't already a working group looking into this maybe there should
> be. I will be happy to be a member of this group if the team decides
> this is a good idea.

we have two main hosts on EC2 - gerrit and jenkins.
the jenkins slaves can be contributed by anyone to the effort, hopefully 
with different distros (and maintained by them to keep the jobs running 
correctly on them).
I can update from red hat side we are looking at contributing more 
hosts/guests to this not on EC2, for both cost and more importantly, 
performance reasons.
the guests would be based on RHEV probably.
again, anyone can contribute computing resources to the jenkins effort.

...
>
> 4) We need to get at least el6 packages produced also I suggest we start
> supporting all supported Fedora builds (Right now that would be F16 and
> F17). A Debian based system would also be great. Having builds being ran
> on more then one os will help remove some of the only works on fedora XX
> issues that I am seeing in the code and commits. There are also bugs
> that hide behind packages that show themselves rarely but become very
> shallow under other OS's. I have seen that in other projects were code
> that seems to work great under one OS will start to bomb under others
> and so bugs that were masked get found and it forces the packaging to
> get more generic.

i agree. both .el6 and debian are things i'd like to see and plan to 
allocate resources to. this will go faster if more people pick some of 
these up.

>
> 5) We really need a review of the current structure of the websites and
> tweak it some as some resources are really hard to find. Simple things
> like adding a top level menu for the wiki most projects have something
> like a documentation tab that points to a predefined wiki page with
> instructions and links to other parts of the wiki covering important
> topics.. Adding a simple URL like wiki.ovirt.org that redirects to
> www.ovirt.org/wiki . There have been other idea's tossed out in the list
> many of them are good ideas and simple to do but unless someone really
> pushes them they tend to go no where. Maybe an official suggesting list
> Editable by all and a todo list (editable by just infra team member) to
> help capture those idea's

agree.
I believe Dave Neary started looking at this.
Dave?

>
> 6) As we see more people testing out the software we are going to get
> the same set of questions over and over again. Lets face it how many
> times has someone emailed users about nfs storage problems. For all
> projects there is always certain questions that get asked a lot. Example
> getting NFS working. We really need to find a way to help people get
> answers before they start emailing the user list. The requirements are
> always hard to get right. We need to find something that the developers
> are willing to use well still keeping it simple enough that users wont
> just bypass or never check.

or add more robust/defensive code around these places to give proper 
error messages.
(not we had these for NFS in the past, but they were too hard to 
maintain as their semantics were hard to keep 100% correct over time).
but maybe a side utility to check this may help, or showing the link to 
the relevant troubleshooting wiki in the error message.

>
> 7) We all know visualization is the future and people are likely going
> to take ovirt engine and vdsm in interesting new ways. we already see
> changing in the networking stack, glusterfs addon, major improvements in
> the UI. There also seems to be a solid todo list that Red Hat is
> funding. With all these great changes coming down the pike we are going
> to have to handle more and more complex build structure. This one kinda
> ties in with #2. We need the ability to spin up other build environments
> then just Fedora latest and RHEV that means we are going to have to
> bring in people who know Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.

looking forward to that.

>
> 8) Look at ways to help members write blogs posts about ovirt and
> providing a way for people to find them. Blog posts are great ways to
> work on new section of the documentation and/or get publicity for a new
> feature. My first ovirt build wasn't based on the wiki but a getting
> started blog post by Jason Brooks. There are always great topic idea out
> there. Off the top of my head I can think of several topics. These
> include things like how to use the glusterfs with oVirt, processor types
> and how to get the most out of clusters, Exporting a VM, Importing from
> VMware, Importing from Xen. Those are just topics off the top of my head
> I am sure there are many more. Personally I have never been a fan of
> planet.xxx sites but I personally have found using a wordpress mu and
> allowing people to post and let the good stuff float to the top of the
> sites really does well. Granted we are not going to see a hundred
> articles a day but a place for people to post might make it easier for
> people to write blog posts and for other people to find them.

Dave?

>
> Well I fell like I am writing a book here and even with that I am sure
> there are things I have missed.
>
> I want to make it clear I am not saying anything bad about the team and
> what has been done already I am just point out things that I fell this
> team should be working on to make the infrastructure behind this great
> project help the project not hinder it.


again - your feedback is most welcome,

thanks,
     Itamar